Fighting words

Should women be involved in front-line combat? Let’s pretend, hypothetically, that physically women could do absolutely everything a man could. This would be rare, but possible. I tend to think that distinctions in service in the military are important for some of the reasons this author outlines. Still, it’s only a very slim minority of women who actually want to engage in this type of combat, so the question is, does it actually matter if one or two women are in armed combat because they desperately want to be?

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Apparently, Rush Limbaugh raised the question of pregnancy. And he got an email from someone who asked him didn’t he know that women in the military could get an injection that would suspend their periods for a year.
To which Limbaugh asked “what else does such a injection do to women?”
Indeed, what else does it do?

Not really. Just because you don’t want to have kids doesn’t mean you want to serve in the military, especially on the front line. Beyond that, he has a point. You are taking high doses of hormones into your body, hormones that were used in the now defunct HRT that increased the risks of heart-attacks, breast cancers, and strokes. Even if you don’t want to have children, those are risks I’m willing to take.

For women who both don’t want and can’t have children, that’s a pretty small number. Then see how many of them want to serve in a front line combat. I could be wrong but I think the author of the article is right; it seems like engineering from above rather than filling a need on the ground.

The problem with women (like me) who have always known they don’t want to have kids is that in many areas of the U.S. ob/gyns will not perform voluntary sterilizations if you’re not a certain age and even then might even require a psych consult, which is of course ridiculous and insulting. Of course, no one ever suggests that you need a psych consult or spends an inordinate amount of time assuring that you understand that having a child is permanent, no matter how questionable your situation may be.

I was 32 when I was finally able to have a tubal ligation, ten years after I was married and had originally sought one. The number of women who are permanently, voluntarily childless is quite small so should actually be taken even more seriously than not. The highest percentage of women who regret voluntary sterilization are those who already have children.